NSF Postdoctoral Fellowship in Biology FY 2020

George, Andrew Bradley, Alpharetta GA

Investigators

Abstract

This action funds an NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Biology for FY 2020, Research Using Biological Collections. The fellowship supports research and training of the Fellow that will utilize biological collections in innovative ways. This project will assess the impacts of protection status on frog and fish diversity in Amazonian Northeast Peru’s Yaguas watershed. The Amazon basin is home to over 400 amphibian species and the highest biodiversity of freshwater fishes in the world. Conserving this biodiversity is critical to maintaining healthy Amazonian ecosystems, which influence global climate patterns. These habitats are often disturbed by human activities, resulting in biodiversity losses. Conservationists aim to prevent these losses by establishing protected areas. However, the impacts of these protected areas remain poorly understood. Comprehensive ecosystem health monitoring requires the integration of both the number of species present and the ecological functions performed by each species. The most vulnerable species often perform unique ecological roles, and the loss of just one of them may translate to a high loss of functional diversity, leaving ecosystems more damaged than biodiversity data alone could predict. This project will improve our understanding of current conservation efforts by incorporating functional diversity into ecosystem monitoring practices. Methods developed in this study will be applicable to a variety of ecosystems and the results will help assess the urgency of the proposed Bajo Putumayo Protection Area, adjacent to Yaguas National Park. The Yaguas watershed provides a unique opportunity to assess the impacts of protection status on wildlife diversity due to the wealth of biodiversity data collected through the Field Museum’s rapid biological inventories in 2010. Some sampled sites have since received protection status with the establishment of the Yaguas Reserved Zone in 2011 and Yaguas National Park in 2018. The Fellow will work with local community members to resample amphibians and fishes in protected and unprotected sites in 2020. Specimens will be collected for biodiversity and functional morphology analyses, and water samples will be taken for water quality and environmental DNA analyses. It is hypothesized that biodiversity, functional diversity, and water quality will have increased between 2010 and 2020 in the protected site and decreased in the unprotected site. The Fellow will receive training in specimen collection and genetic techniques from the sponsoring scientists and will develop field guides for the Yaguas watershed and educational programs for children at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.